The workshop gives AI researchers from different areas (e.g. description logic, constraint satisfaction, nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programs, case-based reasoning, ontologies, planning), real-application developers, and industrial configurator vendors the opportunity to exchange needs, ideas, work, methods, experiments, user-cases, and benchmarks related to the various problems met by configuration applications: theory, knowledge representation, reasoning, optimization, diagnosis, solution repair, interactivity, ontology, cooperative processes, etc. Additionally, the workshop hopes to attract case studies of applying configurators in organizations, including results from operation management researchers and others who may take a “black-box” perspective.
The workshop continues the series of Configuration workshops started at the AAAI 1996 Fall Symposium and continued at AAAI 1999, ECAI 2000, IJCAI 2001, ECAI 2002, and IJCAI 2003 and the special issues of AI-EDAM 2003, AI-EDAM 98 and IEEE Expert 98 journals on configuration. The four previous workshops were particularly successful since they had each more than 40 participants representing academia, end users (such as Siemens, HP or Daimler Benz), and the major configurator vendors (such as Oracle, SAP, or BAAN).
The goal of the workshop is to promote high quality research in configuration and to strengthen the interaction between industry and research. More generally, the workshop is intended for researchers and product developers interested in this area and in the application of AI techniques to real problems and the research fostered by it.